The following information is used for educational purposes only.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Monday, December 31, 2012
The Year in Social Media
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.time.com
APPLE-Tim Cook,CEO
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Runner-Up: Tim Cook, the Technologist
By Lev Grossman ,Dec. 19, 2012
Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. “Each time,” Cook says, “the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.”This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. “Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,” Cook says. “That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.” As we now know, it wasn’t.As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple. Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic.On the day Jobs died, Apple was valued at $351 billion; at press time its market cap stood at $488 billion, more than that of Google and Microsoft. That’s and as in plus: Apple is now worth significantly more than those companies combined. Apple’s cash hoard alone comes to more than $120 billion. It was news in 2011 when Apple passed Exxon Mobil to become the world’s most valuable company. Now Exxon Mobil can barely see Apple’s taillights in the distance, across an $83 billion lead.And Cook has done it his way. Jobs was famously over the top: he came at you from across the room, flashing his lightning-bolt eyebrows, and he browbeat you till you either agreed with him or pretended to, just to make him for God’s sake stop. That’s not how Cook operates. He’s a seducer, a Southern drawler, slow and soft-spoken. He has been observed winking. He doesn’t come at you; he waits for you to come to him. And sooner or later you do, not because you have to but because, dang it, you want to.Cook himself is reluctant to lean too hard on the contrast. “I think there’s some obvious differences,” he says. (He allows himself a chuckle at the understatement.) “The way we conduct ourselves is very different. I decided from negative time zero — a long time before he talked to me about his decision to pass the CEO title — that I was going to be my own self. That’s the only person that I could do a good job with being.”That’s what Jobs wanted.
He didn’t want Cook to be a Jobs knockoff. He wanted Cook to be Cook. “He said, ‘From this day forward, never ask what I would do. Just do what’s right.’ I brought up a couple of examples: ‘Suppose A — do you really want me to make the call?’ Yes. Yes! He talked about Disney and what he saw had happened to Disney [after Walt Disney died], and he didn’t want it to happen to Apple.”Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.”Like Jobs, Cook suffers fools neither gladly nor in any other way (except when he has to, i.e., when talking to journalists). Behind the scenes, that measured calm can — if the legends are true — become a merciless coldness that roots out confusion and incompetence. “I’ve always felt that a part of leadership is conveying a sense of urgency in dealing with key issues,” he says. “Apple operates at an extreme pace, and my experience has been that key issues rarely get smaller on their own.” The definitive Tim Cook anecdote involves a meeting he once called about a crisis in China that required a hands-on solution. After 30 minutes, he looked at one executive and said, “Why are you still here?” The man — a sense of urgency having been successfully conveyed — immediately left the meeting, drove directly to the airport and flew to China, without even a change of clothes.Like Jobs, Cook never shows any doubt in public, either about himself or about Apple, not a scintilla, not for an instant. He rarely strays far from his core message about Apple: that it’s the best, most innovative company in the world, that consumers love it and that it is his privilege to work for it and for them. When speaking about his management style, Cook begins, “CEOs are all packages of strengths and …” He hesitates, looking for some way to reroute the sentence around the word weaknesses. Then he finds it: “and so forth.”And like Jobs, Cook has reason to think of himself as an outsider, even as he sits at the center of global techno-cool, piling up a considerable personal fortune. (In 2011, Apple awarded Cook a golden-handcuffs package of options potentially worth more than $376 million.) Jobs’ story is well known: he was adopted — the biological son of a Syrian graduate student — and he was a college dropout. Cook’s story is very different but no less singular. He’s highly discreet about his private life, but this much is public record: Cook grew up in a small Alabama town called Robertsdale (pop. 5,402), the son of a shipyard worker. According to a speech Cook gave at Goldman Sachs this year, he worked in a paper mill and an aluminum plant. Jobs was at least middle class and a native son of Silicon Valley. Cook is, by all indications, a working-class kid from the Deep South.Cook earned a degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. From there he did the expected thing: he spent 12 years at IBM, where he showed a flair for a finicky, unglamorous side of the business: manufacturing and distribution. From IBM, Cook bounced to Intelligent Electronics and then in 1997 to Compaq as vice president for corporate materials. Then he did the unexpected thing.Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving.
But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”It wasn’t just what they were doing at Apple, it was how they were doing it. The culture was different. “I loved the fact that I could disagree with Steve and he wasn’t offended by it.” For his part, Jobs must have seen something in Cook that wasn’t obvious to anybody else: the maverick, the outsider. “I’ve never thought going the way of the herd was a particularly good strategy,” Cook says. “You can be assured to be at best middle of the pack if you do that. And that’s at best.”Cook got home on Sunday. Jobs offered him the job on Monday. On Tuesday, Cook resigned from Compaq. The same way Ive became Jobs’ trusted lieutenant on the design side, Cook stepped into that role in the less sexy and consumer-facing but equally vital area of manufacturing and distribution.As COO, Cook was content to be a wizard in the dark art of supply-chain management. As CEO, Cook has had to decloak, to focus on the very public product side, the way Jobs did. When Cook looks back at 2012, that’s where he puts the emphasis. “It’s the most prolific year of innovation ever,” he says. “If you went back and were to watch a compressed movie of it, it’s amazing the products that have come out.”He is, of course, correct. In 2012, Apple released the iPhone 5, the newly redesigned MacBook Pro, two new iPods and both the third- and fourth-generation iPads, plus the iPad Mini. Apple completely redesigned its flagship media software, iTunes, and added more than 272,000 new apps to the iTunes store. “This year has been an intense year on products,” he says. “Like no other.”All that is true and amazing and at the same time not 100% surprising. Cook has had the effect on Apple that you’d expect from an operations genius: he’s made all the existing product-improving machinery run even faster and smoother than it already did. The real story of Apple in 2012 may be what Cook has done in China.Jobs never visited the country where most of Apple’s products are built, at least not in any official capacity, but as a manufacturing guy Cook is an old China hand, and on his watch Apple has broken out as a consumer brand there. The iPhone got Apple inside the Great Wall, and it has proved to be a Trojan horse: Apple products are now a status symbol among the newly affluent.When the iPhone 4S launched there in January, there were near riots outside Apple stores; the iPhone 5 sold 2 million units in China in three days. Overall, Apple’s revenue from China grew by $10 billion in 2012. “It’s a huge market with huge potential,” Cook says, “with an enormous emerging middle class that really wants Apple products. I think it will be our largest market, over time.”Apple also met with some serious and very public reversals in 2012. The labor practices of its Chinese manufacturing partners’ factories continued to be a source of embarrassment. September saw the distinctly un-Apple-like launch of Apple Maps, which was buggy and reportedly misinformed as to the location of landmarks like Washington’s Dulles International Airport. These were, if nothing else, opportunities for Cook to show off his chops as a swift, steely decisionmaker.
Cook arranged for independent audits of Apple’s Chinese factories by the Fair Labor Association, and he toured China and met with Vice Premier Li Keqiang. After the Maps debacle, Cook stepped up and made a public apology, in which he took the extraordinary step of urging consumers to use competitors’ products until Apple got its house in order. He also reshuffled his cabinet, ousting the heads of Apple’s retail and mobile-software divisions.Nevertheless, the market’s faith in Apple has seriously wavered since September, when its stock briefly, ecstatically crested above 700. Apple missed earnings estimates in the third and fourth quarters, and while it remains the world’s most valuable company, its stock has taken a sustained three-month hammering that has left it down 25% from that high point.There is a babel of opinions among analysts about what this does or doesn’t mean. Some blame Maps. Some think the increasingly ferocious competition in the smart-phone and tablet markets is making investors nervous. Some think Apple has lost its innovative spark. Others say Apple’s numbers are still so huge, who cares if they’re slightly less than the even more huge but essentially arbitrary numbers that Wall Street analysts expected? Apple’s price-earnings ratio hovers around a robust 12. There are commentators who still consider Apple undervalued. But there’s no question that Cook also has plenty of doubters left to convince.None of this appears to ruffle Cook particularly. “I’ve worked at Apple for 15 years,” he says, “so Apple’s not foreign to me. I don’t mean to sound like it’s all a predictable ride. It’s unpredictable. But it’s always been unpredictable.” He hasn’t altered his personal style any. He remains, like all great Apple products, a paradoxical combination of open and closed, polished and user-friendly but also sealed up tight against anybody who’s curious about what’s inside. You know there are reams of code churning away down there, just below the surface, but you’ll never know exactly what’s going on.His critics say Cook lacks a true technologist’s vision, but it would be more accurate to say that he has yet to show his hand. Apple finished 2012 with a triumphant record of innovation, but it was innovation with a small i, as in incremental. That’s good enough for an ordinary company, but it’s not what made Apple worth more than Exxon Mobil. The essence of Apple is the quantum leap, the unexpected sideways juke into a heretofore unnoticed and underexploited market — personal computers, digital music players, smart phones, tablet computers. Maybe the next stop is televisions; that’s certainly where the rumor mill is going. But the test for Cook will be to seek out a new category that’s vulnerable to disruption and disrupt the hell out of it.I ask Cook if he would do that — if that would continue to be Apple’s modus operandi going forward. He smiles, seductively as always, and says, “Yes. Yes. Most definitely.” When that happens, that’s when Cook will show his hand, and we’ll get a look below the surface. He’ll do the unexpected thing and double down on something new. And when he does, that’s when the rest of the world will see what Jobs saw in him.
Source: www.time.com
Runner-Up: Tim Cook, the Technologist
By Lev Grossman ,Dec. 19, 2012
Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. “Each time,” Cook says, “the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.”This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. “Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,” Cook says. “That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.” As we now know, it wasn’t.As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast. When Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011, of pancreatic cancer, there were questions about whether Cook could lead Apple. Some, myself included, wondered whether Apple was even a viable company without Jobs. Since then Cook has gone about his business apparently unintimidated by his role as successor to one of the greatest innovators in history. Cook’s record hasn’t been flawless, but he has presided in a masterly way over both a thorough, systematic upgrading of each of the company’s major product lines and a run-up in the company’s financial fortunes that can only be described as historic.On the day Jobs died, Apple was valued at $351 billion; at press time its market cap stood at $488 billion, more than that of Google and Microsoft. That’s and as in plus: Apple is now worth significantly more than those companies combined. Apple’s cash hoard alone comes to more than $120 billion. It was news in 2011 when Apple passed Exxon Mobil to become the world’s most valuable company. Now Exxon Mobil can barely see Apple’s taillights in the distance, across an $83 billion lead.And Cook has done it his way. Jobs was famously over the top: he came at you from across the room, flashing his lightning-bolt eyebrows, and he browbeat you till you either agreed with him or pretended to, just to make him for God’s sake stop. That’s not how Cook operates. He’s a seducer, a Southern drawler, slow and soft-spoken. He has been observed winking. He doesn’t come at you; he waits for you to come to him. And sooner or later you do, not because you have to but because, dang it, you want to.Cook himself is reluctant to lean too hard on the contrast. “I think there’s some obvious differences,” he says. (He allows himself a chuckle at the understatement.) “The way we conduct ourselves is very different. I decided from negative time zero — a long time before he talked to me about his decision to pass the CEO title — that I was going to be my own self. That’s the only person that I could do a good job with being.”That’s what Jobs wanted.
He didn’t want Cook to be a Jobs knockoff. He wanted Cook to be Cook. “He said, ‘From this day forward, never ask what I would do. Just do what’s right.’ I brought up a couple of examples: ‘Suppose A — do you really want me to make the call?’ Yes. Yes! He talked about Disney and what he saw had happened to Disney [after Walt Disney died], and he didn’t want it to happen to Apple.”Cook does have a few things in common with Jobs. He’s a workaholic, and not of the recovering kind. He wakes up at 3:45 every morning (“Yes, every morning”), does e-mail for an hour, stealing a march on those lazy East Coasters three time zones ahead of him, then goes to the gym, then Starbucks (for more e-mail), then work. “The thing about it is, when you love what you do, you don’t really think of it as work. It’s what you do. And that’s the good fortune of where I find myself.”Like Jobs, Cook suffers fools neither gladly nor in any other way (except when he has to, i.e., when talking to journalists). Behind the scenes, that measured calm can — if the legends are true — become a merciless coldness that roots out confusion and incompetence. “I’ve always felt that a part of leadership is conveying a sense of urgency in dealing with key issues,” he says. “Apple operates at an extreme pace, and my experience has been that key issues rarely get smaller on their own.” The definitive Tim Cook anecdote involves a meeting he once called about a crisis in China that required a hands-on solution. After 30 minutes, he looked at one executive and said, “Why are you still here?” The man — a sense of urgency having been successfully conveyed — immediately left the meeting, drove directly to the airport and flew to China, without even a change of clothes.Like Jobs, Cook never shows any doubt in public, either about himself or about Apple, not a scintilla, not for an instant. He rarely strays far from his core message about Apple: that it’s the best, most innovative company in the world, that consumers love it and that it is his privilege to work for it and for them. When speaking about his management style, Cook begins, “CEOs are all packages of strengths and …” He hesitates, looking for some way to reroute the sentence around the word weaknesses. Then he finds it: “and so forth.”And like Jobs, Cook has reason to think of himself as an outsider, even as he sits at the center of global techno-cool, piling up a considerable personal fortune. (In 2011, Apple awarded Cook a golden-handcuffs package of options potentially worth more than $376 million.) Jobs’ story is well known: he was adopted — the biological son of a Syrian graduate student — and he was a college dropout. Cook’s story is very different but no less singular. He’s highly discreet about his private life, but this much is public record: Cook grew up in a small Alabama town called Robertsdale (pop. 5,402), the son of a shipyard worker. According to a speech Cook gave at Goldman Sachs this year, he worked in a paper mill and an aluminum plant. Jobs was at least middle class and a native son of Silicon Valley. Cook is, by all indications, a working-class kid from the Deep South.Cook earned a degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. From there he did the expected thing: he spent 12 years at IBM, where he showed a flair for a finicky, unglamorous side of the business: manufacturing and distribution. From IBM, Cook bounced to Intelligent Electronics and then in 1997 to Compaq as vice president for corporate materials. Then he did the unexpected thing.Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving.
But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”It wasn’t just what they were doing at Apple, it was how they were doing it. The culture was different. “I loved the fact that I could disagree with Steve and he wasn’t offended by it.” For his part, Jobs must have seen something in Cook that wasn’t obvious to anybody else: the maverick, the outsider. “I’ve never thought going the way of the herd was a particularly good strategy,” Cook says. “You can be assured to be at best middle of the pack if you do that. And that’s at best.”Cook got home on Sunday. Jobs offered him the job on Monday. On Tuesday, Cook resigned from Compaq. The same way Ive became Jobs’ trusted lieutenant on the design side, Cook stepped into that role in the less sexy and consumer-facing but equally vital area of manufacturing and distribution.As COO, Cook was content to be a wizard in the dark art of supply-chain management. As CEO, Cook has had to decloak, to focus on the very public product side, the way Jobs did. When Cook looks back at 2012, that’s where he puts the emphasis. “It’s the most prolific year of innovation ever,” he says. “If you went back and were to watch a compressed movie of it, it’s amazing the products that have come out.”He is, of course, correct. In 2012, Apple released the iPhone 5, the newly redesigned MacBook Pro, two new iPods and both the third- and fourth-generation iPads, plus the iPad Mini. Apple completely redesigned its flagship media software, iTunes, and added more than 272,000 new apps to the iTunes store. “This year has been an intense year on products,” he says. “Like no other.”All that is true and amazing and at the same time not 100% surprising. Cook has had the effect on Apple that you’d expect from an operations genius: he’s made all the existing product-improving machinery run even faster and smoother than it already did. The real story of Apple in 2012 may be what Cook has done in China.Jobs never visited the country where most of Apple’s products are built, at least not in any official capacity, but as a manufacturing guy Cook is an old China hand, and on his watch Apple has broken out as a consumer brand there. The iPhone got Apple inside the Great Wall, and it has proved to be a Trojan horse: Apple products are now a status symbol among the newly affluent.When the iPhone 4S launched there in January, there were near riots outside Apple stores; the iPhone 5 sold 2 million units in China in three days. Overall, Apple’s revenue from China grew by $10 billion in 2012. “It’s a huge market with huge potential,” Cook says, “with an enormous emerging middle class that really wants Apple products. I think it will be our largest market, over time.”Apple also met with some serious and very public reversals in 2012. The labor practices of its Chinese manufacturing partners’ factories continued to be a source of embarrassment. September saw the distinctly un-Apple-like launch of Apple Maps, which was buggy and reportedly misinformed as to the location of landmarks like Washington’s Dulles International Airport. These were, if nothing else, opportunities for Cook to show off his chops as a swift, steely decisionmaker.
Cook arranged for independent audits of Apple’s Chinese factories by the Fair Labor Association, and he toured China and met with Vice Premier Li Keqiang. After the Maps debacle, Cook stepped up and made a public apology, in which he took the extraordinary step of urging consumers to use competitors’ products until Apple got its house in order. He also reshuffled his cabinet, ousting the heads of Apple’s retail and mobile-software divisions.Nevertheless, the market’s faith in Apple has seriously wavered since September, when its stock briefly, ecstatically crested above 700. Apple missed earnings estimates in the third and fourth quarters, and while it remains the world’s most valuable company, its stock has taken a sustained three-month hammering that has left it down 25% from that high point.There is a babel of opinions among analysts about what this does or doesn’t mean. Some blame Maps. Some think the increasingly ferocious competition in the smart-phone and tablet markets is making investors nervous. Some think Apple has lost its innovative spark. Others say Apple’s numbers are still so huge, who cares if they’re slightly less than the even more huge but essentially arbitrary numbers that Wall Street analysts expected? Apple’s price-earnings ratio hovers around a robust 12. There are commentators who still consider Apple undervalued. But there’s no question that Cook also has plenty of doubters left to convince.None of this appears to ruffle Cook particularly. “I’ve worked at Apple for 15 years,” he says, “so Apple’s not foreign to me. I don’t mean to sound like it’s all a predictable ride. It’s unpredictable. But it’s always been unpredictable.” He hasn’t altered his personal style any. He remains, like all great Apple products, a paradoxical combination of open and closed, polished and user-friendly but also sealed up tight against anybody who’s curious about what’s inside. You know there are reams of code churning away down there, just below the surface, but you’ll never know exactly what’s going on.His critics say Cook lacks a true technologist’s vision, but it would be more accurate to say that he has yet to show his hand. Apple finished 2012 with a triumphant record of innovation, but it was innovation with a small i, as in incremental. That’s good enough for an ordinary company, but it’s not what made Apple worth more than Exxon Mobil. The essence of Apple is the quantum leap, the unexpected sideways juke into a heretofore unnoticed and underexploited market — personal computers, digital music players, smart phones, tablet computers. Maybe the next stop is televisions; that’s certainly where the rumor mill is going. But the test for Cook will be to seek out a new category that’s vulnerable to disruption and disrupt the hell out of it.I ask Cook if he would do that — if that would continue to be Apple’s modus operandi going forward. He smiles, seductively as always, and says, “Yes. Yes. Most definitely.” When that happens, that’s when Cook will show his hand, and we’ll get a look below the surface. He’ll do the unexpected thing and double down on something new. And when he does, that’s when the rest of the world will see what Jobs saw in him.
Source: www.time.com
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
SEASON´S GREETINGS!!!!!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Whatever is bright and beautiful,
Whatever brings you happiness,
These are the things Clara Moras wishes for you and your family.
Whatever is bright and beautiful,
Whatever brings you happiness,
These are the things Clara Moras wishes for you and your family.
Friday, December 7, 2012
TED Talks-Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and Listen!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Everything I do, and everything I do professionally --my life -- has been shapedby seven years of work as a young man in Africa.From 1971 to 1977 --I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) --I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia,in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.
I worked for an Italian NGO,and every single project that we set up in Africafailed.And I was distraught.I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good peopleand we were doing good work in Africa.Instead, everything we touched we killed.
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book,"Ripples from the Zambezi,"was a project where we Italiansdecided to teach Zambian people how to grow food.So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambiain this absolutely magnificent valleygoing down to the Zambezi River,and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoesand zucchini and ...And of course the local people had absolutely no interestin doing that, so we paid them to come and work,and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter)And we were amazed that the local people,in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture.But instead of asking them how come they were notgrowing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter)"Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation."
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully.We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomatowould grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size.And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians,"Look how easy agriculture is."When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red,overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the riverand they ate everything. (Laughter)
And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!"
And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter)
"Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked."
I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa,but then I saw what the Americans were doing,what the English were doing, what the French were doing,and after seeing what they were doing,I became quite proud of our project in Zambia.Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.
You should see the rubbish — (Applause) --You should see the rubbish that we have bestowedon unsuspecting African people.You want to read the book,read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo,Zambian woman economist.The book was published in 2009.We Western donor countries have given the African continenttwo trillion American dollars in the last 50 years.I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done.Just go and read her book.Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done.
We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries,and there are only two ways we deal with people:We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic.The two words come from the Latin root "pater,"which means "father."But they mean two different things.Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different cultureas if they were my children. "I love you so much."Patronizing, I treat everybody from another cultureas if they were my servants.That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.
I was given a slap in the face reading a book,"Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said,above all in economic development, if peopledo not wish to be helped, leave them alone.This should be the first principle of aid.The first principle of aid is respect.This morning, the gentleman who opened this conferencelay a stick on the floor, and said,"Can we -- can you imagine a citythat is not neocolonial?"
I decided when I was 27 years oldto only respond to people,and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation,where you never initiate anything,you never motivate anybody, but you become a servantof the local passion, the servant of local peoplewho have a dream to become a better person.So what you do -- you shut up.You never arrive in a community with any ideas,and you sit with the local people.We don't work from offices.We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub.We have zero infrastructure.And what we do, we become friends,and we find out what that person wants to do.
The most important thing is passion.You can give somebody an idea.If that person doesn't want to do it,what are you going to do?The passion that the person has for her own growthis the most important thing.The passion that that man has for his own personal growthis the most important thing.And then we help them to go and find the knowledge,because nobody in the world can succeed alone.The person with the idea may not have the knowledge,but the knowledge is available.
So years and years ago, I had this idea:Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the communityto tell people what to do, why don't, for once,listen to them? But not in community meetings.
Let me tell you a secret.There is a problem with community meetings.Entrepreneurs never come,and they never tell you, in a public meeting,what they want to do with their own money,what opportunity they have identified.So planning has this blind spot.The smartest people in your community you don't even know,because they don't come to your public meetings.
What we do, we work one-on-one,and to work one-on-one, you have to createa social infrastructure that doesn't exist.You have to create a new profession.The profession is the family doctor of enterprise,the family doctor of business, who sits with youin your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe,and helps you find the resources to transform your passioninto a way to make a living.
I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia.I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time,trying to go away from this patronizing bullshitthat we arrive and tell you what to do.And so what I did in Esperance that first yearwas to just walk the streets, and in three daysI had my first client, and I helped this first guywho was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy,and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth,to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say,"You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?"And I helped these five fishermen to work togetherand get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albanyfor 60 cents a kilo, but we found a wayto take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo,and the farmers came to talk to me, said,"Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?"In a year, I had 27 projects going on,and the government came to see me to say,"How can you do that?How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult.I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter)
So — (Applause) —So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter)We've done it in 300 communities around the world.We have helped to start 40,000 businesses.There is a new generation of entrepreneurswho are dying of solitude.
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history,died age 96, a few years ago.Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophybefore becoming involved in business,and this is what Peter Drucker says:"Planning is actually incompatiblewith an entrepreneurial society and economy."Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
So now you're rebuilding Christchurchwithout knowing what the smartest people in Christchurchwant to do with their own money and their own energy.You have to learn how to get these peopleto come and talk to you.You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy,you have to be fantastic at helping them,and then they will come, and they will come in droves.In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients.Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people,the intelligence and the passion?Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning?Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.
So what I'm saying is thatentrepreneurship is where it's at.We are at the end of the first industrial revolution --nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing --and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable.The internal combustion engine is not sustainable.Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable.What we have to look at is at how wefeed, cure, educate, transport, communicatefor seven billion people in a sustainable way.The technologies do not exist to do that.Who is going to invent the technologyfor the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it!Government? Forget about it!It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.
There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazinemany, many years ago.There was a group of experts who were invitedto discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860.And in 1860, this group of people came together,and they all speculated about what would happento the city of New York in 100 years,and the conclusion was unanimous:The city of New York would not exist in 100 years.Why? Because they looked at the curve and said,if the population keeps growing at this rate,to move the population of New York around,they would have needed six million horses,and the manure created by six million horseswould be impossible to deal with.They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter)So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technologythat is going to choke the life out of New York.
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900,in the United States of America, there were 1,001car manufacturing companies -- 1,001.The idea of finding a different technologyhad absolutely taken over,and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters.Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.
However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs.First, you have to offer them confidentiality.Otherwise they don't come and talk to you.Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated,passionate service to them.And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship.The smallest company, the biggest company,has to be capable of doing three things beautifully:The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic,you have to have fantastic marketing,and you have to have tremendous financial management.Guess what?We have never met a single human beingin the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money.It doesn't exist.This person has never been born.We've done the research, and we have lookedat the 100 iconic companies of the world --Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford,all the new companies, Google, Yahoo.There's only one thing that all the successful companiesin the world have in common, only one:None were started by one person.Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-oldsin Northumberland, and we start the classby giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography,and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline,in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiographyhow many times Richard uses the word "I"and how many times he uses the word "we."Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times.He wasn't alone when he started.Nobody started a company alone. No one.So we can create the communitywhere we have facilitators who come from a small business backgroundsitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddieswho will do to you, what somebody did for this gentlemanwho talks about this epic,somebody who will say to you, "What do you need?What can you do? Can you make it?Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?""Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?"We activate communities.We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitatorto help you to find resources and peopleand we have discovered that the miracleof the intelligence of local people is suchthat you can change the culture and the economyof this community just by capturing the passion,the energy and imagination of your own people.
Thank you. (Applause)
Transcript:
Everything I do, and everything I do professionally --my life -- has been shapedby seven years of work as a young man in Africa.From 1971 to 1977 --I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) --I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia,in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.
I worked for an Italian NGO,and every single project that we set up in Africafailed.And I was distraught.I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good peopleand we were doing good work in Africa.Instead, everything we touched we killed.
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book,"Ripples from the Zambezi,"was a project where we Italiansdecided to teach Zambian people how to grow food.So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambiain this absolutely magnificent valleygoing down to the Zambezi River,and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoesand zucchini and ...And of course the local people had absolutely no interestin doing that, so we paid them to come and work,and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter)And we were amazed that the local people,in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture.But instead of asking them how come they were notgrowing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter)"Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation."
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully.We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomatowould grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size.And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians,"Look how easy agriculture is."When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red,overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the riverand they ate everything. (Laughter)
And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!"
And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter)
"Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked."
I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa,but then I saw what the Americans were doing,what the English were doing, what the French were doing,and after seeing what they were doing,I became quite proud of our project in Zambia.Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.
You should see the rubbish — (Applause) --You should see the rubbish that we have bestowedon unsuspecting African people.You want to read the book,read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo,Zambian woman economist.The book was published in 2009.We Western donor countries have given the African continenttwo trillion American dollars in the last 50 years.I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done.Just go and read her book.Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done.
We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries,and there are only two ways we deal with people:We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic.The two words come from the Latin root "pater,"which means "father."But they mean two different things.Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different cultureas if they were my children. "I love you so much."Patronizing, I treat everybody from another cultureas if they were my servants.That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.
I was given a slap in the face reading a book,"Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said,above all in economic development, if peopledo not wish to be helped, leave them alone.This should be the first principle of aid.The first principle of aid is respect.This morning, the gentleman who opened this conferencelay a stick on the floor, and said,"Can we -- can you imagine a citythat is not neocolonial?"
I decided when I was 27 years oldto only respond to people,and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation,where you never initiate anything,you never motivate anybody, but you become a servantof the local passion, the servant of local peoplewho have a dream to become a better person.So what you do -- you shut up.You never arrive in a community with any ideas,and you sit with the local people.We don't work from offices.We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub.We have zero infrastructure.And what we do, we become friends,and we find out what that person wants to do.
The most important thing is passion.You can give somebody an idea.If that person doesn't want to do it,what are you going to do?The passion that the person has for her own growthis the most important thing.The passion that that man has for his own personal growthis the most important thing.And then we help them to go and find the knowledge,because nobody in the world can succeed alone.The person with the idea may not have the knowledge,but the knowledge is available.
So years and years ago, I had this idea:Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the communityto tell people what to do, why don't, for once,listen to them? But not in community meetings.
Let me tell you a secret.There is a problem with community meetings.Entrepreneurs never come,and they never tell you, in a public meeting,what they want to do with their own money,what opportunity they have identified.So planning has this blind spot.The smartest people in your community you don't even know,because they don't come to your public meetings.
What we do, we work one-on-one,and to work one-on-one, you have to createa social infrastructure that doesn't exist.You have to create a new profession.The profession is the family doctor of enterprise,the family doctor of business, who sits with youin your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe,and helps you find the resources to transform your passioninto a way to make a living.
I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia.I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time,trying to go away from this patronizing bullshitthat we arrive and tell you what to do.And so what I did in Esperance that first yearwas to just walk the streets, and in three daysI had my first client, and I helped this first guywho was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy,and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth,to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say,"You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?"And I helped these five fishermen to work togetherand get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albanyfor 60 cents a kilo, but we found a wayto take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo,and the farmers came to talk to me, said,"Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?"In a year, I had 27 projects going on,and the government came to see me to say,"How can you do that?How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult.I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter)
So — (Applause) —So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter)We've done it in 300 communities around the world.We have helped to start 40,000 businesses.There is a new generation of entrepreneurswho are dying of solitude.
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history,died age 96, a few years ago.Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophybefore becoming involved in business,and this is what Peter Drucker says:"Planning is actually incompatiblewith an entrepreneurial society and economy."Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.
So now you're rebuilding Christchurchwithout knowing what the smartest people in Christchurchwant to do with their own money and their own energy.You have to learn how to get these peopleto come and talk to you.You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy,you have to be fantastic at helping them,and then they will come, and they will come in droves.In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients.Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people,the intelligence and the passion?Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning?Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.
So what I'm saying is thatentrepreneurship is where it's at.We are at the end of the first industrial revolution --nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing --and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable.The internal combustion engine is not sustainable.Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable.What we have to look at is at how wefeed, cure, educate, transport, communicatefor seven billion people in a sustainable way.The technologies do not exist to do that.Who is going to invent the technologyfor the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it!Government? Forget about it!It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.
There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazinemany, many years ago.There was a group of experts who were invitedto discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860.And in 1860, this group of people came together,and they all speculated about what would happento the city of New York in 100 years,and the conclusion was unanimous:The city of New York would not exist in 100 years.Why? Because they looked at the curve and said,if the population keeps growing at this rate,to move the population of New York around,they would have needed six million horses,and the manure created by six million horseswould be impossible to deal with.They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter)So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technologythat is going to choke the life out of New York.
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900,in the United States of America, there were 1,001car manufacturing companies -- 1,001.The idea of finding a different technologyhad absolutely taken over,and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters.Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.
However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs.First, you have to offer them confidentiality.Otherwise they don't come and talk to you.Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated,passionate service to them.And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship.The smallest company, the biggest company,has to be capable of doing three things beautifully:The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic,you have to have fantastic marketing,and you have to have tremendous financial management.Guess what?We have never met a single human beingin the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money.It doesn't exist.This person has never been born.We've done the research, and we have lookedat the 100 iconic companies of the world --Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford,all the new companies, Google, Yahoo.There's only one thing that all the successful companiesin the world have in common, only one:None were started by one person.Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-oldsin Northumberland, and we start the classby giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography,and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline,in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiographyhow many times Richard uses the word "I"and how many times he uses the word "we."Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times.He wasn't alone when he started.Nobody started a company alone. No one.So we can create the communitywhere we have facilitators who come from a small business backgroundsitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddieswho will do to you, what somebody did for this gentlemanwho talks about this epic,somebody who will say to you, "What do you need?What can you do? Can you make it?Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?""Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?"We activate communities.We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitatorto help you to find resources and peopleand we have discovered that the miracleof the intelligence of local people is suchthat you can change the culture and the economyof this community just by capturing the passion,the energy and imagination of your own people.
Thank you. (Applause)
CANVAS-Introduction & Video Guides
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•How are assignments re-submitted and what does it look like? (Video)
•What are the different types of online submissions? (Video)
•What is the difference between assignments and events? (Video)
•How do I lock an Assignment? (Video)
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Course Home Page
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•InstructureCon 2011: Desire2Migrate Angels and Blackboards (Video)
•What is the Course Import Tool? (Video)
•How do I use the Course Import Tool? (Video)
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Course Setup Checklist
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Course Statistics
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Course Status
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Grades
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•How do I publish grades to my students? (Video)
•How do I drop the lowest score and curve grades? (Video)
•How do students check their hypothetical grades? (Video)
Groups
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Help Corner
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•How do I hide Module contents?
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Notification Preferences
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•What are Outcomes? (Video)
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Pages
•How do I link to the Equella Content Repository?
•What are Pages? (Video)
•How do I export Apple Pages documents to PDF? (Video)
People
•How does the People feature work? (Video)
•How can I view student statistics? (Video)
•How do I add a new user to my course? (Video)
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•How do Quizzes work? (Video)
•How do I make a Quiz visible to my students? (Video)
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•How can I give my students an extra attempt on a Quiz? (Video)
•How do I import quizzes from Respondus 4.0? (Video)
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•How do I record media comments in the SpeedGrader™? (Video)
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Wednesday, December 5, 2012
TOEIC-Practice Exam-Abridged Version-25pg
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TOEIC-Essential Tactics & Model Test 2-67pg
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TOEIC-Essential Tactics & Model Test 1-69pg
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Saturday, December 1, 2012
TED Talks-Janine Shepherd: A broken body isn´t a broken person
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Life is about opportunities,creating them and embracing them, and for me,that was the Olympic dream.That's what defined me. That was my bliss.
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team,headed towards the Winter Olympics,I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates.As we made our way up towardsthe spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney,it was the perfect autumn day:sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream.Life was good.We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hourswhen we got to the part of the ride that I loved,and that was the hills, because I loved the hills.And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I startedpumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air,I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked upto see the sun shining in my face.
And then everything went black.Where was I? What was happening?My body was consumed by pain.I'd been hit by a speeding utility truckwith only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride.I was airlifted from the scene of the accidentby a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney.I had extensive and life-threatening injuries.I'd broken my neck and my back in six places.I broke five ribs on my left side.I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone.I broke some bones in my feet.My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel.My head was cut open across the front, lifted back,exposing the skull underneath.I had head injures. I had internal injuries.I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five litersof blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold.By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospitalin Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing.I was having a really bad day. (Laughter)
For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions.I had an awareness of being in my body, but alsobeing out of my body, somewhere else, watchingfrom above as if it was happening to someone else.Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken?
But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me."
"No. It's too hard."
"Come on. This is our opportunity."
"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me."
"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together."
I was at a crossroads.I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever.It was the fight of my life.After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body,and the internal bleeding stopped.
The next concern was whether I would walk again,because I was paralyzed from the waist down.They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture,but the back was completely crushed.The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut,stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces.They'd have to operate.They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me,literally cut me in half, I have a scarthat wraps around my entire body.They picked as much broken bone as they couldthat had lodged in my spinal cord.They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back,L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib,they fused T12, L1 and L2 together.Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up.I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excitedthat the operation had been a success because at that stageI had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes,and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!"(Laughter)I had no idea. That's the sort of thingthat happens to someone else, not me, surely.
But then the doctor came over to me, and she said,"Janine, the operation was a success, and we've pickedas much bone out of your spinal cord as we could,but the damage is permanent.The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure.You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll haveall of the injuries that go along with that.You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most,you might get 10- or 20-percent return.You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life.You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life.And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame."And then she said, "Janine,you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life,because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before."
I tried to grasp what she was saying.I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done.If I couldn't do that, then what could I do?And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that,then who was I?
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal.I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed.I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings onto protect from blood clots.I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips.I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my headand I saw my world through a mirrorthat was suspended above my head.I shared the ward with five other people,and the amazing thing is that because we were all lyingparalyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like.How amazing is that? How often in lifedo you get to make friendships, judgment-free,purely based on spirit?And there were no superficial conversationsas we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears,and our hopes for life after the spinal ward.
I remember one night, one of the nurses came in,Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws.He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said,"Start threading them together."Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did.And when we'd finished, he went around silentlyand he joined all of the straws uptill it looped around the whole ward, and then he said,"Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws."And we did. And he said, "Right. Now we're all connected."And as we held on, and we breathed as one,we knew we weren't on this journey alone.And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward,there were moments of incredible depth and richness,of authenticity and connectionthat I had never experienced before.And each of us knew that when we left the spinal wardwe would never be the same.
After six months, it was time to go home.I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair,wrapped in a plaster body cast,and feeling the sun on my face for the first time.I soaked it up and I thought,how could I ever have taken this for granted?I felt so incredibly grateful for my life.But before I left the hospital, the head nursehad said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready,because when you get home, something's going to happen."And I said, "What?" And she said,"You're going to get depressed."And I said, "Not me, not Janine the Machine,"which was my nickname.She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone.In the spinal ward, that's normal.You're in a wheelchair. That's normal.But you're going to get home and realizehow different life is."
And I got home and something happened.I realized Sister Sam was right.I did get depressed.I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down,attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk.I'd lost so much weight in the hospitalI now weighed about 80 pounds.And I wanted to give up.All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door.I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed,and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again."
And I thought, "How could it? Because I've lost everythingthat I valued, everything that I'd worked towards.Gone."And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?"
And then I remembered my friendsthat were still in the spinal ward,particularly Maria.Maria was in a car accident, and she woke upon her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic,had no movement from the neck down,had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk.They told me, "We're going to move you next to herbecause we think it will be good for her."I was worried. I didn't know how I'd reactto being next to her.I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing,because Maria always smiled.She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again,albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once.And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance.
And I realized that this wasn't just my life.It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain.It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before,that I had a choice. I could keep fighting thisor I could let go and accept not only my bodybut the circumstances of my life.And then I stopped asking, "Why me?"And I started to ask, "Why not me?"And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottomis actually the perfect place to start.
I had never before thought of myself as a creative person.I was an athlete. My body was a machine.But now I was about to embark on the most creative projectthat any of us could ever do:that of rebuilding a life.And even though I had absolutely no ideawhat I was going to do, in that uncertaintycame a sense of freedom.I was no longer tied to a set path.I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities.And that realization was about to change my life.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast,an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up,and I thought to myself, "That's it!If I can't walk, then I might as well fly."I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly."She said, "That's nice, dear." (Laughter)I said, "Pass me the yellow pages."She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school,I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight.They said, "You know, when do you want to come out?"I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me outbecause I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either.Is that a problem?"I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chrisand my mom drove me out to the airport,all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body castin a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter)I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidateto get a pilot's license. (Laughter)I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand.I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson."And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws."You get her." "No, no, you take her."Finally this guy comes out. He goes,"Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying."I go, "Great." And so they drive me down,they get me out on the tarmac,and there was this red, white and blue airplane.It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit.They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit.They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere.I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?"Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up.He said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?"That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedalsto control the airplane on the ground.I said, "No, I can't use my legs."He went, "Oh."I said, "But I can use my hands," and he said, "Okay."
So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power.And as we took off down the runway,and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne,I had the most incredible sense of freedom.And Andrew said to me,as we got over the training area,"You see that mountain over there?"And I said, "Yeah."And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain."And as I looked up, I realizedthat he was pointing towards the Blue Mountainswhere the journey had begun.And I took the controls, and I was flying.And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward,and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot.Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical.But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream.So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan.And I practiced my walking as much as I could,and I went from the point of two people holding me upto one person holding me upto the point where I could walk around the furnitureas long as it wasn't too far apart.And then I made great progression to the pointwhere I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls,like this, and Mom said she was forever following me,wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter)But at least she always knew where I was.
So while the doctors continued to operateand put my body back together again,I went on with my theory study, and then eventually,and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical,and that was my green light to fly.And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school,way out of my comfort zone,all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots,you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast,and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls,my bag of medication and catheters and my limp,and they used to look at me and think,"Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this."And sometimes I thought that too.But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burnedthat far outweighed my injuries.
And little goals kept me going along the way,and eventually I got my private pilot's license,and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia.And then I learned to fly an airplane with two enginesand I got my twin engine rating.And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weatherand got my instrument rating.And then I got my commercial pilot's license.And then I got my instructor rating.And then I found myself back at that same schoolwhere I'd gone for that very first flight,teaching other people how to fly,just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward.(Applause)
And then I thought, "Why stop there?Why not learn to fly upside down?"And I did, and I learned to fly upside downand became an aerobatics flying instructor.And Mom and Dad? Never been up.But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited,it was my spirit that was unstoppable.
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said,"When you let go of what you are,you become what you might be."I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I wasthat I was able to create a completely new life.It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should havethat I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me.I now know that my real strengthnever came from my body,and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically,who I am is unchanged.The pilot light inside of me was still a light,just as it is in each and every one of us.
I know that I'm not my body,and I also know that you're not yours.And then it no longer matters what you look like,where you come from, or what you do for a living.All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanityby living our lives as the ultimate creative expressionof who we really are,because we are all connectedby millions and millions of straws,and it's time to join those upand to hang on.And if we are to move towards our collective bliss,it's time we shed our focus on the physicaland instead embrace the virtues of the heart.
So raise your straws if you'll join me.
Thank you. (Applause)Thank you.
Transcript:
Life is about opportunities,creating them and embracing them, and for me,that was the Olympic dream.That's what defined me. That was my bliss.
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team,headed towards the Winter Olympics,I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates.As we made our way up towardsthe spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney,it was the perfect autumn day:sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream.Life was good.We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hourswhen we got to the part of the ride that I loved,and that was the hills, because I loved the hills.And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I startedpumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air,I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked upto see the sun shining in my face.
And then everything went black.Where was I? What was happening?My body was consumed by pain.I'd been hit by a speeding utility truckwith only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride.I was airlifted from the scene of the accidentby a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney.I had extensive and life-threatening injuries.I'd broken my neck and my back in six places.I broke five ribs on my left side.I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone.I broke some bones in my feet.My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel.My head was cut open across the front, lifted back,exposing the skull underneath.I had head injures. I had internal injuries.I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five litersof blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold.By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospitalin Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing.I was having a really bad day. (Laughter)
For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions.I had an awareness of being in my body, but alsobeing out of my body, somewhere else, watchingfrom above as if it was happening to someone else.Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken?
But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me."
"No. It's too hard."
"Come on. This is our opportunity."
"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me."
"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together."
I was at a crossroads.I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever.It was the fight of my life.After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body,and the internal bleeding stopped.
The next concern was whether I would walk again,because I was paralyzed from the waist down.They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture,but the back was completely crushed.The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut,stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces.They'd have to operate.They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me,literally cut me in half, I have a scarthat wraps around my entire body.They picked as much broken bone as they couldthat had lodged in my spinal cord.They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back,L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib,they fused T12, L1 and L2 together.Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up.I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excitedthat the operation had been a success because at that stageI had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes,and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!"(Laughter)I had no idea. That's the sort of thingthat happens to someone else, not me, surely.
But then the doctor came over to me, and she said,"Janine, the operation was a success, and we've pickedas much bone out of your spinal cord as we could,but the damage is permanent.The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure.You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll haveall of the injuries that go along with that.You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most,you might get 10- or 20-percent return.You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life.You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life.And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame."And then she said, "Janine,you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life,because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before."
I tried to grasp what she was saying.I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done.If I couldn't do that, then what could I do?And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that,then who was I?
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal.I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed.I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings onto protect from blood clots.I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips.I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my headand I saw my world through a mirrorthat was suspended above my head.I shared the ward with five other people,and the amazing thing is that because we were all lyingparalyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like.How amazing is that? How often in lifedo you get to make friendships, judgment-free,purely based on spirit?And there were no superficial conversationsas we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears,and our hopes for life after the spinal ward.
I remember one night, one of the nurses came in,Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws.He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said,"Start threading them together."Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did.And when we'd finished, he went around silentlyand he joined all of the straws uptill it looped around the whole ward, and then he said,"Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws."And we did. And he said, "Right. Now we're all connected."And as we held on, and we breathed as one,we knew we weren't on this journey alone.And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward,there were moments of incredible depth and richness,of authenticity and connectionthat I had never experienced before.And each of us knew that when we left the spinal wardwe would never be the same.
After six months, it was time to go home.I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair,wrapped in a plaster body cast,and feeling the sun on my face for the first time.I soaked it up and I thought,how could I ever have taken this for granted?I felt so incredibly grateful for my life.But before I left the hospital, the head nursehad said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready,because when you get home, something's going to happen."And I said, "What?" And she said,"You're going to get depressed."And I said, "Not me, not Janine the Machine,"which was my nickname.She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone.In the spinal ward, that's normal.You're in a wheelchair. That's normal.But you're going to get home and realizehow different life is."
And I got home and something happened.I realized Sister Sam was right.I did get depressed.I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down,attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk.I'd lost so much weight in the hospitalI now weighed about 80 pounds.And I wanted to give up.All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door.I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed,and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again."
And I thought, "How could it? Because I've lost everythingthat I valued, everything that I'd worked towards.Gone."And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?"
And then I remembered my friendsthat were still in the spinal ward,particularly Maria.Maria was in a car accident, and she woke upon her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic,had no movement from the neck down,had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk.They told me, "We're going to move you next to herbecause we think it will be good for her."I was worried. I didn't know how I'd reactto being next to her.I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing,because Maria always smiled.She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again,albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once.And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance.
And I realized that this wasn't just my life.It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain.It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before,that I had a choice. I could keep fighting thisor I could let go and accept not only my bodybut the circumstances of my life.And then I stopped asking, "Why me?"And I started to ask, "Why not me?"And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottomis actually the perfect place to start.
I had never before thought of myself as a creative person.I was an athlete. My body was a machine.But now I was about to embark on the most creative projectthat any of us could ever do:that of rebuilding a life.And even though I had absolutely no ideawhat I was going to do, in that uncertaintycame a sense of freedom.I was no longer tied to a set path.I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities.And that realization was about to change my life.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast,an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up,and I thought to myself, "That's it!If I can't walk, then I might as well fly."I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly."She said, "That's nice, dear." (Laughter)I said, "Pass me the yellow pages."She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school,I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight.They said, "You know, when do you want to come out?"I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me outbecause I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either.Is that a problem?"I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chrisand my mom drove me out to the airport,all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body castin a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter)I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidateto get a pilot's license. (Laughter)I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand.I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson."And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws."You get her." "No, no, you take her."Finally this guy comes out. He goes,"Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying."I go, "Great." And so they drive me down,they get me out on the tarmac,and there was this red, white and blue airplane.It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit.They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit.They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere.I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?"Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up.He said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?"That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedalsto control the airplane on the ground.I said, "No, I can't use my legs."He went, "Oh."I said, "But I can use my hands," and he said, "Okay."
So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power.And as we took off down the runway,and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne,I had the most incredible sense of freedom.And Andrew said to me,as we got over the training area,"You see that mountain over there?"And I said, "Yeah."And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain."And as I looked up, I realizedthat he was pointing towards the Blue Mountainswhere the journey had begun.And I took the controls, and I was flying.And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward,and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot.Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical.But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream.So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan.And I practiced my walking as much as I could,and I went from the point of two people holding me upto one person holding me upto the point where I could walk around the furnitureas long as it wasn't too far apart.And then I made great progression to the pointwhere I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls,like this, and Mom said she was forever following me,wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter)But at least she always knew where I was.
So while the doctors continued to operateand put my body back together again,I went on with my theory study, and then eventually,and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical,and that was my green light to fly.And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school,way out of my comfort zone,all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots,you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast,and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls,my bag of medication and catheters and my limp,and they used to look at me and think,"Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this."And sometimes I thought that too.But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burnedthat far outweighed my injuries.
And little goals kept me going along the way,and eventually I got my private pilot's license,and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia.And then I learned to fly an airplane with two enginesand I got my twin engine rating.And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weatherand got my instrument rating.And then I got my commercial pilot's license.And then I got my instructor rating.And then I found myself back at that same schoolwhere I'd gone for that very first flight,teaching other people how to fly,just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward.(Applause)
And then I thought, "Why stop there?Why not learn to fly upside down?"And I did, and I learned to fly upside downand became an aerobatics flying instructor.And Mom and Dad? Never been up.But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited,it was my spirit that was unstoppable.
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said,"When you let go of what you are,you become what you might be."I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I wasthat I was able to create a completely new life.It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should havethat I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me.I now know that my real strengthnever came from my body,and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically,who I am is unchanged.The pilot light inside of me was still a light,just as it is in each and every one of us.
I know that I'm not my body,and I also know that you're not yours.And then it no longer matters what you look like,where you come from, or what you do for a living.All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanityby living our lives as the ultimate creative expressionof who we really are,because we are all connectedby millions and millions of straws,and it's time to join those upand to hang on.And if we are to move towards our collective bliss,it's time we shed our focus on the physicaland instead embrace the virtues of the heart.
So raise your straws if you'll join me.
Thank you. (Applause)Thank you.
TED Talks-Paolo Cardini: Forget multitasking, try monotasking
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
I'm a designer and an educator.I'm a multitasking person, and I push my studentsto fly through a very creative, multitasking design process.But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?
Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking.A couple of examples.Look at that.This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter)So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS,and maybe uploading some picturesabout this awesome barbecue.
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers,so this two percent of people who are ableto control multitasking environment.But what about ourselves, and what about our reality?When's the last time you really enjoyedjust the voice of your friend?So this is a project I'm working on,and this is a series of front coversto downgrade our super, hyper —(Laughter) (Applause)to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phonesinto the essence of their function.
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice?How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streetson the island.But our multitasking reality is pretty different,and full of tons of information.So what about something like thatto rediscover our sense of adventure?
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about monowhen the number of possibilities is so huge,but I push you to consider the option offocusing on just one task,or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.
So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product.Why not? So find your monotask spotwithin the multitasking world.Thank you.(Applause)
Transcript:
I'm a designer and an educator.I'm a multitasking person, and I push my studentsto fly through a very creative, multitasking design process.But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?
Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking.A couple of examples.Look at that.This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter)So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS,and maybe uploading some picturesabout this awesome barbecue.
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers,so this two percent of people who are ableto control multitasking environment.But what about ourselves, and what about our reality?When's the last time you really enjoyedjust the voice of your friend?So this is a project I'm working on,and this is a series of front coversto downgrade our super, hyper —(Laughter) (Applause)to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phonesinto the essence of their function.
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice?How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streetson the island.But our multitasking reality is pretty different,and full of tons of information.So what about something like thatto rediscover our sense of adventure?
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about monowhen the number of possibilities is so huge,but I push you to consider the option offocusing on just one task,or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.
So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product.Why not? So find your monotask spotwithin the multitasking world.Thank you.(Applause)
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